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1.2.7-Pilferingapples
Brick!Club Volume I Fantine 2. Ch 7 The Inwardness of Despair Well, at least this is going up earlier than last night?hahaha Sorry to be running behind, everyone, offline life has been a bit overbusy lately. THE INWARDNESS OF DESPAIR Thanks for the chapter titles, Hugo! It’s good to know we’re in for WACKY FUN. Really though this is one of my favorite chapters. I don’t mind Hugo going off on Opinions at all when they’re in the more-or-less earthly realm, apparently. The bit about the corn between millstones is perfect, but I’m still glad for the mini-dissertation on the effects of social injustice on the soul (also, Denny uses “psychologist” a lot here— is that the right word? Would psychologists regularly have been in prisons to examine inmates? I DON’T HAVE MY FMA I’M SO CONFUSED.) I am intrigued by the step-by-step way Valjean approaches his consideration of punishment. On the one hand, it seems like an unusual way to handle internal turmoil, but then I also feel like it fits with his nature as it’s been presented. He’s not trained to be a QUICK thinker, he has no distractions; I can imagine him working through each step and following up the conclusions like he’s having a proper internal debate. It’s a bit odd reading this chapter now and catching how desperately it’s trying to persuade the reader that Valjean WAS a decent person who’s been corrupted by the cruelty of his society. While this choirgirl doesn’t mind the preaching, it’s a hard reminder that a lot of readers, then and now, wouldn’t otherwise even consider that a criminal could have more motivations than “he’s a bad guy” for his actions. And Hugo doesn’t shy away from admitting that Valjean HAS become a dangerous man; in fact he drives the point home again and again, that Valjean has largely lost his sense of reason and is full of anger and hate, a very dangerous combination. Without that fact, too, the rest of the book wouldn’t mean much. Valjean IS dangerous, he IS in darkness, he IS operating on the same instinctive level as the dogs that drove him out. To borrow from another verbose author: This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of Valjean’s story. But it also has to be understood that this isn’t a natural condition of his being, or else this chapter couldn’t make me want to fall down and sob so much the story wouldn’t work. Tomorrow: MORE PHILOSOPHY and I am thrilled! Commentary Caramarthenfan The word Hugo uses is physiologiste, physiologist. One of the things I find interesting about Valjean in general is how hard Hugo drives home that the prison system makes people more dangerous to society. Which we still haven’t really accepted today—it’s true that many countries today have a less harsh penal code, and that prison conditions are less awful in Europe and the U.S. than they were in the 19th century—but we still widely have systems based on punishment rather than reform; programs to give prisoners functional skills that they can use to reenter society and a sense of pride in work, despite having been demonstrated many times in the last 200 years to effectively reduce recidivism rates dramatically, are still “experimental” and rare and prone to cancellation by political whim; prison rape is still treated by most people as a joke and a porn trope rather than a serious issue that actually needs to be stopped because no one, not even the worst criminal “deserves” rape. We have come a lot less far in terms of prison reform in 200 years than I think Hugo hoped, and there’s still great resistance to the suggestion that a major effect of prisons as they currently exist may be to take people who aren’t so bad and make them worse. Gascon-en-exile I always like to start answering any translation questions if you or someone has had them if I can, because those always make good jumping-off points. The original uses physiologiste as does the Hapgood translation, which is roughly the same thing (though technically psychology as a recognizable discipline only emerged at the end of the century, so there’s that). However, in both instances Hugo talks about the theoretical diagnosis of Valjean, so I don’t think it’s literally a matter of a prison doctor examining him or something. Anyway, I’m fresh off a huge post of my own, so I’ll be brief here for my own sake. I feel like this chapter is the core of Hugo’s opinion piece on the nature vs. nurture issue, and it’s extremely obvious which side he supports. On the other hand, I was surprised to see him be fairly dismissive of the education that Valjean picked up in prison when he usually stresses the value of education so hard. I think he’s emphasizing that intent is, as always, important (that is, don’t learn stuff just to use it to better hate God and the world), though there’s also perhaps a criticism of…institutional complicity, perhaps? As in the millstone metaphor, Valjean learns but feels no connection with his detached teachers whom he views as part of the system that is crushing him. It’ll be up to the bishop to raise Valjean up to that level and give him genuine spiritual instruction. Oh, and I do like the pointed, one-sentence paragraphs in this chapter. They are as emphatic as his repeated use of the question-and-answer format of outlining the evolution of Valjean’s thought process. Aren’t they?